President Biden announced on Friday that Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor and one of the loudest critics of Big Tech’s powers, will join the White House.
Wu’s appointment suggests that the Biden administration will push for aggressive action to curb the size and influence of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple by working with Congress on antitrust legislation and influencing federal regulators.
Wu will work on technology and competition policy, a newly created role, within Biden’s National Economic Council.
Wu, 48, is well known for his confrontational approach to the tech industry and particularly his advocacy for stronger competition laws. He has broad support in the left wing of the Democratic Party and with anti-monopoly groups that have been fighting to break up or regulate Big Tech companies for years.
Wu has fought hard against powerful telecommunications companies and is perhaps best known for coining the term “net neutrality,” the principle that internet service providers should treat all information on the internet the same and not discriminate or charge differently based on where it’s coming from or to whom it’s going.
FIVE COUNTRIES TAKING A HARD STANCE AGAINST BIG TECH
He has advanced the idea that big corporations use their economic power to create political power and that this can harm democracy, which is why the government needs to consider breaking them up, a main argument in his 2018 book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.
The Columbia University professor was most recently teaching antitrust law and previously has worked in President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, the Federal Trade Commission, and the New York attorney general’s office.
Biden himself has been critical of social media companies and the liability shield that many of them benefit from, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Biden has said in the past that Section 230 should be revoked.
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Biden has yet to fill out the top tech regulatory enforcement roles in his administration. Regardless of who he picks, the FTC is expected to feature more aggressive antitrust enforcement in the Biden era, and Obama-era net neutrality regulations are expected to return.
